The Red Baron: A World War I Novel, Page 2

  The teenagers suddenly fell to the ground and were enveloped by the wheat. Manfred kept the charge going, uncaring for the enemy’s strange actions.

  Machine gun fire erupted from the tree line. The bang-bang-bang of shots and phalanx of bullets ended the charge. Heinrich grunted as a bullet smacked into his shoulder. He dropped his lance and fell from his horse. He landed with a thud and was immediately trampled by his panicked horse. Schwehr’s mount screamed and pitched forward, sending the rider tumbling to the ground. Schwehr sprang back to his feet as more gunfire popped from the tree line. The staccato of a dozen more unseen French soldiers joined the din of the machine gun. Schwehr jerked as bullets found their mark; he managed two more steps before falling.

  Manfred had accomplished his mission; he’d found the retreating French army. A bullet zipped past his head as he turned about. More shots rang out, each new crack convincing Manfred that the French were here in force. Blue-clad soldiers crept from the woods by the dozen.

  He and Palz raced back toward the barn. The rest of his platoon emerged from the fog and formed into a line to charge the enemy. Damn Steiner for not following orders, Manfred thought.

  “Signal retreat! Now!” Manfred ordered Palz.

  Palz nodded and brought the bugle to his lips. A bullet caught him in the back and exploded out of his chest before he could blow a note, spraying blood onto Manfred’s face. Palz looked down at the wound and wobbled in his saddle. Manfred lunged for the bugle as Palz fell back. The bugle bounced from Manfred’s fingertips and tumbled to the ground.

  Manfred looked up and saw his platoon advancing toward him at a gallop.

  “No! No, go back!” he shouted. He waved his arms and stood in the saddle and waved his pistol, hoping they would recognize their lieutenant through the fog. He earned the attention of several French soldiers as more bullets cracked in the air.

  Manfred collapsed against his horse to minimize the target he presented and slammed his spurs into his mount.

  His platoon broke into a charge. The French machine gun roared back to life, and his men started to die. Men and horses crumbled under the withering fire of hundreds of Frenchmen. His platoon disintegrated in less than a minute.

  He saw Corporal Vogel, who insisted Manfred attend his newborn’s baptism, hit twice before he fell from the saddle. Private Bergmann, whose family tended land on the Manfred estate, took a bullet to the head. Fischer survived the death of his mount, but was trampled by a horse gone berserk from a bullet wound.

  Sergeant Steiner, on foot and clutching a broken arm to his side, attempted to shout orders to what remained of the platoon. Manfred extended his hand to Steiner as he finally rejoined his platoon. He’d pull Steiner onto his horse and get him out of the kill zone.

  Steiner reached for Manfred’s hand, then a bullet grazed Manfred’s horse. She screamed and bucked as Manfred held on for dear life. His mount, no longer caring for her rider’s commands, galloped past Steiner and away from the carnage.

  Manfred managed a glance behind him; a half dozen cavalrymen were with him as they retreated. Six of twenty.

  Manfred waited outside the squadron headquarters, just another tent in the mud of the sprawling German field command. Manfred huddled closer to the tent walls as the rain increased. Staff officers scurried from tent to tent, delivering running tallies of casualties, supply amounts, and intelligence on the French armies’ movements. The German army had lost effective contact with the French, which meant the French were in full retreat or preparing a counterattack against a vulnerable flank in the German advance. Both possibilities meant frantic action on part of the Germans.

  Manfred caught rumors about a battle brewing on the Marne River and English counterattacks near the Channel. Yesterday, that news would have filled him with excitement, but the promise of battle now rang hollow.

  He shivered as the rain soaked through his uniform. He stayed hunched over, protecting the list inside his breast pocket. He hadn’t been told why the commander wanted to see him, but Manfred was pretty sure that his career in the Imperial German army had reached a quick and ignoble conclusion.

  The shame of telling his father of his failure would hurt the old man. Yet Manfred dreaded encountering the families of his lost platoon even more.

  A staff officer stuck his head out of the tent, and then looked up at the rain with a sneer, as if angry with the weather. The staff officer looked at the wet officer before him with pity. “Lieutenant, he’ll see you now.”

  The squadron commander, an older man well into his fifties, looked at a map of northern France, bracing himself over the map with locked-out arms. Rumor had it that his eyes were shot, and he kept his command only thanks to a distant kinship with the Kaiser.

  Manfred stopped two paces from the table and gave the requisite stomp and salute. “Sir, Lieutenant von Richthofen reports as ordered.”

  Colonel von Schwerin glanced up at his subordinate, and then turned his attention back to the map. Manfred lowered his salute.

  “Sir, I regret to inform you that—”

  “Shh!” von Schwerin hissed. He took a wooden marker, a cavalry sword painted on it, and placed it on the map.

  “Where did you encounter the enemy?”

  Manfred approached the map, the place of battle a few inches away from the marker. Manfred took a pencil from the table and pointed to the location. His career might be over, but he had enough self-respect to never point to the map with a finger, a lesson drilled into him at Wahlstatt.

  “How many enemy soldiers did you encounter?”

  “At least two hundred, sir.”

  “Any special equipment? Just infantry? No cavalry?”

  “A machine gun, it…it killed…”

  Von Schwerin silenced him with a wave of his hand. The commander moved the marker to the location and sighed heavily.

  “Bring me the troop commanders,” the commander said to the staff officer, who promptly left the tent.

  Manfred pulled a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket. “I have a list of my missing soldiers here, sir.” Some of the inked names smudged from the rain, some from Manfred’s tears as he wrote the list.

  “Give it to the adjutant at regimental headquarters. Go, Lieutenant.” Von Schwerin’s ample mustache twitched as he spoke.

  “Sir, will you need me for—“

  “I haven’t decided what to do with you yet. The longer you stand here and annoy me, the more inclined I am to put you in charge of the draft horses,” he said. Manfred blanched at the idea of leading the supply section, full of broken-down horses and the simplest of German soldiers.

  Manfred saluted smartly. Von Schwerin adjusted his glasses in response, and then returned his attention to the map.

  The rain had worsened. Manfred hunched over and made his way up the row of evenly spaced tents.

  “Richthofen!” someone called from the rain.

  A pair of soldiers stood beyond the outermost tent next to a horse-drawn cart. One of the soldiers waved to Manfred. The other slouched against the cart.

  Manfred trotted over, his boots splashing through the growing puddles. The soldier by the cart, his back facing Manfred, was missing a boot, but he didn’t seem to care that he was barefoot in the mud.

  “Sir, this is one of your men, right?”

  All of his surviving men were holed up in the stables, taking care of their stressed-out horses. Had someone else survived the battle?

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Manfred touched the shoeless man on the shoulder. Sergeant Steiner slowly turned to face his platoon leader. The right side of Steiner’s head was covered in clotted blood, the rain doing little to wash it away. Even though he looked right at Manfred, he looked past him with stunned eyes.

  “Steiner! Thank God you’re alive—who else made it back with you? What happened?”

  Steiner managed a croak as he reached out to claw at Manfred’s arm. Manfred wrapped his arm around the man’s waist before h
e could fall over.

  “Sorry, sir. I think he took a good blow to the head. Can you take him to the field hospital? They aren’t in a hurry, but they have one last place to be and damned if everyone around here doesn’t want everything done by yesterday,” the soldier said as he motioned to the cart. Several dead Germans were stacked atop each other like planks of wood.

  Manfred looked at the dead; his heart refused to beat.

  “Are those…mine?”

  “No, sir. Artillerymen hit by the French, if that makes you feel any better.” He shrugged and took the reins of the mule and led the cart away. The cart lurched through a depression, jostling the bodies.

  Steiner’s knees buckled; Manfred struggled to keep him on his feet.

  “Come on, Sergeant Steiner, let’s get you to the doctor,” Manfred said. Steiner didn’t acknowledge Manfred, but he managed to move in the direction Manfred half-dragged, half-pulled him.

  Steiner had a terrible limp, but no obvious wound to his leg, which kept their pace slow as they made their way to the field hospital. The hospital was one of the few buildings surrounded by motorized vehicles, the field ambulances that had already proven their worth in the short time since the war started.

  The hospital was bedlam. Walking wounded clustered around a woodburning stove, dark blood seeping through bandages. They did their best to remain silent, as the pain they felt was nothing compared to the soldiers still on litters. The moans and infrequent cries of those who’d lost limbs or struggled to breathe through the agony of a sucking chest wound as harried nurses and orderlies tended to them.

  Manfred could see the shadows of a surgical team at work on the bed sheets hung up around the patient, a jerry-rigged attempt to give some privacy and spare the other wounded the ghastly spectacle of what awaited many of them.

  A nurse, tall with red hair bound tight under her cap, knelt next to a litter bearing a wounded soldier, his right leg missing from the thigh down, the sheet over his lower body soaked in blood from a blown tourniquet. She held a mirror beneath his nose for a few moments, and then placed it back in her red-stained apron when no fog formed on the surface. She pulled the sheet over the dead man’s head and stood up.

  She approached Manfred and looked him over.

  “Where are you hurt?”

  “Me? No.” Manfred helped Steiner stutter-step toward the nurse. She ran her fingers under Steiner’s earlobes and gave a grim look at the milky fluid she found.

  “What treatment has he received?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “When was he injured?”

  “I’m not sure. I found him like this…”

  Her lips pressed into a thin line as she brandished a finger toward Manfred.

  The tent flap was thrown open, and a pair of wet orderlies burst into the hospital, a wounded man writhing on the litter they carried.

  “Otersdorf! We’ve got five more out here—help us!” the lead orderly said to the nurse.

  Nurse Otersdorf pulled Steiner over toward the rest of the walking wounded. He stood stock still, staring at the side of the tent.

  “You,” she said to Manfred, “make yourself useful and take him through the back.” She pointed to a dead soldier. “Karl! Help him.”

  A squat, pudgy orderly came away from a basin where he was cleaning surgical instruments and grabbed the litter handles closest to the dead man’s remaining foot. Manfred grabbed the other end and lifted him up. The newly arrived wounded soldier took up the space a moment later.

  Karl led them past the surgery bays. Manfred did his best to focus on the orderly’s back, not wanting to look at the dead man’s vacant eyes.

  Outside the hospital, rows and rows of sheet-wrapped bodies lay in the mud. Karl set the litter down at the end of a row and went about wrapping the body in the sheet. The orderly worked with care, tucking the sheet below the body and tying a knot at the corpse’s foot, despite the driving rain.

  Manfred stared at the row of bodies, the faces of the deceased visible through the wet vails. Some faces were at peace, others had slack jaws and drooping features as though their vacated souls had served as the scaffolding for their countenance.

  Karl moved passed Manfred, giving him a slight nod and a pat on the forearm as he went back inside.

  Manfred stood there, among the rain, the dead, and the cries of pain from the wounded.

  “So this is war.”

  He touched the list in his breast pocket. At least he could remove Steiner’s name from the missing.

  Chapter 3— “For Another Purpose”

  Duty in regimental headquarters was insufferably comfortable. Meals were hot, work hours regular, and the only danger Manfred faced came from staff cars driven by reckless messengers.

  His shift at the field telephone would end soon. The war had boiled down to nothing more than him answering the phone, jotting down whatever message came through, and passing it on to its recipient. On rare occasions, he led a crew of wiremen to repair lines cut by French shelling. He hadn’t ventured near the trenches or heard a shot fired in anger since his one, and only, battle.

  He’d been reassigned to the communications staff after he lost his platoon. The rest of the squadron met a similar fate. Cavalrymen were sent to the infantry, where they suffered the ignominy of walking to and from battle, the war-horses relegated to nothing more than draft animals. Manfred hadn’t kept up with his fellow officers, partly out of shame for his defeat by the French, and partly out of fear to learn they’d found a new and meaningful place in the war.

  The field telephone hadn’t rung in hours, so Manfred used the time to finish up a letter to his father. In the last letter, his father had gone on and on about Lothar receiving the Iron Cross for capturing a French machine gun. His father’s pride begged the question of when Manfred would finally accomplish something of note during the war. He didn’t know how to romanticize copious note-taking or his unblemished driving record.

  The distant thump of artillery broke Manfred’s concentration. His ear, trained by months of exposure, told him it was outgoing German fire, and the phone wouldn’t ring to report another French shelling. He sighed.

  “Another day at war,” Lieutenant Huber said, patting Manfred’s shoulder with a heavy hand. Then again, every part of Huber was heavy. His belly stretched the front of his tunic to the point where his undershirt was clearly visible between the buttons. His double chins and heavy jowls might have been considered jolly anyplace but the army. “At least we’re spending it here and not a few kilometers west, right?”

  Not for the first time, Manfred wondered if launching Huber over French lines would be a war crime.

  “Keep the coffee hot and we’ll both have medals to wear home for Christmas,” Huber said. The portly officer glanced at the dwindling fire under the tent stove. He headed to the exit and the pile of wood outside the tent.

  Huber collided with a massive soldier, the new arrival’s bulk in his chest and shoulders, at the entryway. The impact sent Huber to the ground, sputtering in surprise and indignation. The man lost control of a pouch he was carrying, spilling half-oval pieces of metal across the floor. Two pieces slid under Manfred’s desk.

  Huber clambered back to his feet and straightened his uniform. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, you oaf?”

  The other man was on his knees, collecting the fallen metal pieces, gave no heed to Huber.

  “Who’s your commander? This headquarters runs on good order and discipline.”

  The man sprang back to his feet. His stern face, seemingly dyed brown from trench mud, matched the ferocity of the trench knife at his hip, the brass handguard adorned with spikes. He took a step toward Huber and cocked his head.

  “You’re right. How can I present myself now that I reek of a base hog?” he said.

  Huber, suddenly less inclined for a confrontation, stepped around the soldier and bolted through the exit.

  Manfred knelt down and picked up the two half ov
als at his feet. Both had the name, religion, blood type and unit of a soldier stamped onto them. One had a dried smudge, the deep red of old blood.

  He stood and handed the dog tags to the man, a lieutenant by his rank shoulder boards, whose hands were dirty and rough, like a farmer fresh from the field.

  “Sorry about Huber. He’s territorial guard,” Manfred said. Even when mobilized for war, the regular army considered the territorial guard a repository for retirees and those who never really wanted to serve; it always made for a good joke.

  The lieutenant grunted and placed the two dog tags back in the pouch.

  “What was it you called him? A ‘base hog’? I haven’t heard that one before.”

  “Are you new to the staff?” the lieutenant asked.

  “A bit,” Manfred said, not wanting to admit the months of boredom he’d spent in and around the headquarters.

  “A base hog is someone who enjoys all of this,” the lieutenant gestured to the hot stove, steaming coffee pot, and the trays of half-eaten meals waiting to be cleared away by orderlies. “While my men and I sleep in the mud. You should come see the trenches, see the real war.”

  The lieutenant pushed past Manfred and walked toward the adjutant’s section.

  Manfred watched the lieutenant go and felt ashamed. Ashamed of his clean uniform, his easy life answering a phone that never rang. Ashamed that his failure as a leader would ensure that all the glory he’d ever win at this war would be an offhand compliment from a senior officer on the quality of his staff work.

  Huber returned with his arms full of firewood. An idea lit up Manfred’s mind. Huber might prove useful after all.

  “Huber, take the rest of my shift. I’ll make it up to you later,” Manfred said as he scooped up his cap from the desk. He didn’t wait for an answer; Huber had a morning shift, and those didn’t agree with his hangovers. Manfred rushed off to find his supervisor, Captain Adler. He’d need permission for what he had planned.

  Manfred ran from the command tent and spotted the lieutenant walking past an artillery piece limbered to a carriage. He caught up to the man moments later.